Foodmania: Kids & Food in a Marketing Driven World--a Family-Based Media Literacy and Nutrition Childhood Obesity Prevention Program

Introduction: Risk of childhood obesity increases with exposure to television and food advertising. Viewing food and beverage advertising influences a child’s preferences, requests and consumption of foods. Three quarters of foods marketed to youth are for high calorie, low nutrient foods that promote weight gain. Simply limiting exposure to food marketing may not be reasonable. Potentially harmful food marketing messages are ubiquitous and difficult for parents to monitor.

According to the Message-Interpretation Processing (MIP) model, both emotional responses and logical comparisons about food messages in the media affect internal responses and outcome expectancies that shape nutrition behaviors. A media literacy intervention is expected to alter the message interpretation process by improving critical thinking skills which in turn influence efficacy, expectations, intentions and ultimately nutrition behaviors for both youth and parents as a result of increased parent-child discussions about media and foods.

Methods: The MIP model is applied as a theory of change to an interactive 6-week family media literacy and nutrition intervention for preventing childhood obesity using a Strengthening Families 10-14 format. Extension youth development and nutrition educators delivered the program in real world community settings in five different county sites across the state. Both media literacy and nutrition measures were collected at pretest and posttest for intervention (n = 50) and control (n = 51) parent-child dyads.

Results: Structural Equation Modeling showed participating in FoodMania predicted child-initiated discussion about food and media which in turn predicted child critical thinking about food message content and talking with parents about the Nutrition Facts Label. Compared to controls, at posttest the intervention parents reported higher efficacy and positive expectations about discussing food and food advertising, more social support from children for purchasing fruits and vegetables, using nutrition labels more often to choose foods with less calories, fat, sugar and sodium, and a better score for availability of less healthy foods in the home. Intervention youth reported eating more fruits and vegetables at posttest compared to controls.

Conclusions: FoodMania fostered connections between nutrition and media literacy, as well as parents and youth, and promoted nutrition behaviors likely to prevent childhood obesity. Collaboration with Extension professionals was essential for successful development and delivery of FoodMania. Dissemination via the national Extension system has the potential for supporting population-level change.